Shoot for the Moon
RICHARD WISEMAN
(Quercus, 288 PP, £20)
Tablet Bookshop price £18 • Tel 020 7799 4064

Want to improve your problem-solving, manage a high-tech project and lose weight along the way? Look no further. Subtitled “Achieve the Impossible with the Apollo Mindset” (hmm ...), the ground for the sales pitch is the half-century since the first moon landing: Richard Wiseman analyses the dynamically positive approaches that made it happen, and from his findings gives us some tips for self-improvement. Opportunistic publishing or genuinely interesting study? Or both?

To start with, he takes us back to 1950s’ American gloom at the achievements of the Soviets’ Sputnik. When the Americans launched their own satellite in 1957 it fell back and exploded. “Kaputnik!” said the Daily Express. When Yuri Gagarin became one of the most famous men on earth (and without a rival off it), there was agonised American soul-searching.

Kennedy announced that same year an astonishing ambition – that America would put a man on the moon by 1969. Such was his charisma and zeal that, when he spoke about it to an audience of up to 40,000, they believed it could happen, whether through “optimism, arrogance, or innocence” as one devotee said – and many young men were inspired. Passion therefore was the first essential: “Go big or go home.”